Everyone who grew up watching The Wizard of Oz will undoubtedly recall how terrifying the Wicked Witch of the West’s flying monkeys were. Flying monkey narcissist become caught up in a narcissist’s plan, frequently putting other people’s lives in peril. The narcissist may “piggyback” information from one meeting to the next using their flying monkeys.
The narcissist often recruits narcissist family flying monkeys, such as narcissist flying monkeys siblings, flying monkey narcissistic mother, flying monkey narcissist father or children. Everybody has dealt with flying monkey narcissist bosses or political personalities that need a team of employees who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty to function. Close friends or coworkers may also behave in this manner.
What Does The Phrase “Flying Monkeys” In The Context Of Narcissism?
The concept of flying monkeys is one of the idioms connected to narcissism in an extensive lexicon.
The Evil Witch
The terrible witch of the west, who used flying monkeys to carry out all of her horrible activities, including spreading lies and generally engaging in the dirty work of narcissists, was a character in The Wizard of Oz, which the majority of us watched as children.
Unquestionably, the scenario’s wicked witch is the narcissist.
A Flying Monkey
To carry out their devious plan, a narcissist with a narcissistic personality disorder might command “flying monkeys” or carrier pigeons, which frequently get caught in a web of drama and deceit. Some of the narc’s preferred methods for damaging their targets’ lives include deception, gaslighting, guilt-tripping, and victimization.
Types Of Flying Monkeys
A narcissist will create a scenario in which the victim is the abuser, and the narcissist is the victim to spread rumors and lies about the victim and “attract a flying monkey.” The deliberate victim-degradation strategies of narcissists draw many species of flying monkeys.
Against strangers, peers, friends, and family
Covert narcissists usually travel simultaneously between several social groups. It’s one of the flying monkey tactics for ensuring a consistent flow of narcissistic content. As a result, strangers will suddenly arrive to join the hate campaign against you. You’ll learn they have been disseminating false information about you for a while. Because of the narc, they will always be too conscious to try to get to know the real you.
Unaware versus somewhat or completely aware
Some of the abuser’s supporters won’t even be aware that they’ve been fabricating stories, playing the victim, and projecting their flaws onto you. They will think you are as bad as they have been led to believe, and they will be happy to assist in your downfall in the name of justice.
Others will fully understand the narcissist’s deception, or at the absolute least, it will be accepted.
Social influence over you versus physical power over you
However, when we say that someone has “physical power over you,” we don’t always mean that they use physical force to restrain their target as flying monkeys do. We’re talking about how they might restrict your mobility options. The monkeys will try to prevent you from visiting the locations you require, want, or value.
People who have social sway over you have the power to restrict your access to friends and social networks and change their dynamics. One of the narcissists’ secret strategies.
How To Spot A Flying Monkey
Making a connection between the person suspected of being a flying monkey and the narcissist in their life, as well as the narrative that person is promoting, is the most precise and reliable technique to identify a flying monkey.
Due to how similar flying monkeys may be to narcissist enablers, it can be difficult for victims and survivors of narcissistic abuse to recognize them. Flying monkeys with internalized abuse may act covertly or overtly, such as by pretending to be friends with the victim or actively participating in the narcissist’s smear campaign. Fortunately, a reliable and accurate way to locate a flying monkey exists.
How To Respond To A Flying Monkey
Here are a few tips about how to deal with a narcissist flying monkey.
Remain true to yourself
Starting simply by recognizing when you are cold would be beneficial. Or when you sense or hear your stomach growl, pretending to be hungry.
Start by identifying your physiological sensations rather than enabling someone to persuade you that you cannot be hungry. But to achieve that, you must engage in mindfulness practices, periodically check in with yourself, and have faith in your thoughts and feelings.
Avoid narcissists and their enablers or flying monkeys
When dealing with your family or job, it could be challenging to put this aside. However, if they’re someone like the Instagram troll who thinks COVID-19 is a fraud, it’s pretty easy just to push the mute button. While it may be tempting to engage with them, setting boundaries may give you the space you need to confront reality.
Grey rock
What happens to flying monkeys? They make an effort to speak with the Narcs victim. You’ve to ignore them. With the narcissist and their flying monkeys, you can employ the Grey Rock tactic. Each person should see a grey rock statement like “I’m doing OK” or a single word like “Yes.” Don’t discuss any personal issues that are happening in your life. Your comments must be dispassionate at all times.
Invite some people who don’t gaslight
They are the people you can relate to since they don’t question your opinions or sentiments. This may seem relatively clear-cut. Theoretically, this is what treatment aims to do.
Stop giving people a second chance and the benefit of the doubt
Ironically, charm is a trait shared by the majority of narcissists. They effortlessly draw people into their orbit. This is how they assemble their merry band of adherents, which might be why you still retain their loyalty, my friend. But ultimately, you’ll have to build that sturdy wall.
Consider therapy
Particularly if you have experience interacting with narcissists and their friends, once more, trauma like having a narcissistic father or other family members who supported their toxic behavior may call for professional help.
Instead of disputing your reality, a qualified therapist would attest to it. It can sometimes make all the difference to have that safe space, giving you the chance to practice believing in yourself.
Keep thorough records
To check social media on all your devices, including your phone, learn to use screen capture. You will require it. Take a screenshot as soon as you notice flying monkeys pursuing you on social media. They’re likely to resign once they realize how much worse they made you and themselves appear.
The Use of Flying Monkeys by Narcissists
You are too aware of narcs’ ability to get others to submit to their whims and demands if you have ever been around them.
These Flying Monkeys might be convinced to help the narcissist if,
Spying
Let’s imagine that after your breakup, you decided to remain silent to put the situation behind you and move on. One or more Flying Monkeys may monitor your social media profiles for Narc, who will report on their findings.
You must try to keep your privacy secure. Ensure your social media account’s privacy settings are set to private and be picky about which friend requests you accept. Ask as many of your shared connections as you can to find out as much as you can about the newcomers, and only get invitations from friends of friends. Before permitting them, conduct a little investigation.
Defamation and gossip campaigns
Even though most individuals chat periodically, it can be embarrassing if you’re the unfortunate one and it gets out of hand. Unfortunately, narcissists and those who support them usually behave in a bullying manner. They might turn to a smear campaign even though it’s a pretty terrible, juvenile thing to do if they feel insulted and want to punish you for having the audacity to cease their power trip and control over you.
Instead of attempting to protect yourself or react, be the best, purest version of yourself.
Simply say that you wish them happiness and good luck if someone calls you out on the terrible things you are alleged to have done to the narc.
Assaults and group interventions
A group of Flying Monkeys will use this strategy to persuade you that a specific course of action is in your best interests. Only when they act in this manner can they genuinely represent the narcs. Because the offending narc constantly complains about how much they have offended you or how they have never done anything wrong, your family members will usually become antagonistic toward you. This happens more frequently in these circumstances when the parent in question is also the narc parent.
If you are unable or reluctant to remove someone from your life instantly, it is advisable to choose not to reply. They may not be especially interested in what you have to say. But the fact that they acted as a middleman shows that they have entirely ceded to the abuser’s authority and power over them. You can respond after they’ve finished speaking by stating that you don’t care what they have to say. Their opinions are untrue because they were developed without ever speaking to you or hearing your side of the story.
The Five Things Flying Monkeys Provide To Narcissists
A flying monkey will fool you into making up with the narcissist
The fabricated narrative’s repetition is one characteristic of a flying monkey. In other words, they believe that you are the issue and that the narcissist is the victim. One of the most common ways narcissists recruit flying monkeys is by spreading rumors, lies, and gossip. Regardless of whether the narcissist is telling the truth, this tactic aims to win over those who like drama and want to meddle in other people’s lives.
The narcissist will have support from a flying monkey
Maintaining a narcissist’s fake persona is their top priority in life. Due to their unhappy or abusive upbringing, they are among the world’s most self-hating people and lack emotional maturity. Narcissists shield their fragile sense of self from damage by projecting their repressed negative emotions onto others. The manipulative behaviors that define narcissistic relationships are used to achieve this. Therefore, when put in a situation where they cannot constantly express their unpleasant emotions to someone, they need a lot of assistance.
The flying monkeys will accept the narcissist’s apology
Between being a narcissist enabler and a flying monkey dispatched to apologize for a narcissist’s behavior. If you’re unaware, a narcissist enabler treats the situation as if it were a healthy relationship since they don’t know about or have never encountered narcissistic abuse. As a result, the harmful cycle is restarted by offering poor advice that can gaslight. The individual who approached them with facts about the narcissistic abuse.
The no-contact strategy will fail because of a flying monkey
To stop communicating with the narcissist in your life, use the “no contact” method. The best defense against narcissistic abuse is undoubtedly cold turkey withdrawal, even though it goes against a narcissist’s personality, particularly their sense of specialness. An identity conflict causes the narcissist to experience what is essentially simple ego injury, but because they are emotionally uncontrollable, they respond furiously and act out narcissistically.
The narcissist will employ flying monkeys in his smear campaign
One of the most common varieties is a flying monkey that will participate in the narcissist’s smear campaign. Like the narcissist, these flying monkeys are entitled and self-centered. You are being mistreated by proxy by someone. Rather than because the narcissist has transformed them, they often mistreat you out of a sense of moral obligation.
Both parties gain from this relationship since a narcissist may use other people to carry out their nasty deeds. They give in to their insecure yearning for power and control while assembling all the narcissistic elements for the abuse.
Do Flying Monkeys Ever See The Truth
The lies narcissists tell friends and family members to persuade them of their skewed perception of reality are one of the most overt indications of their unfathomable illusion. On the other hand, so many people take their narrative as gospel. Making narcissistic abuse survivors and victims question whether the flying monkeys the narcissist has created can ever come to see the truth.
At some point, they’ll understand that flying monkeys are merely a narcissist’s temporary ego-protection technique. The narcissist will release the flying monkey once they have fulfilled their objective, just like everyone else.
How To Respond To A Flying Monkey Who Has Witnessed The Truth
Dealing with the fallout from narcissistic abuse is the most crucial skill to acquire once you have left a selfish environment. Choosing which connections to fix and which to let break is one of the most complicated challenges on the road to recovery.
Determine the Type of Flying Monkey You Are Handling
Controlling a flying monkey who has just learned the truth will never be easy. The other half of you won’t know what to do with this person you previously trusted. While the other half of you will be dissatisfied with their betrayal. Some flying monkeys are also victims of the same terrible, dishonest, and manipulative abuse you’re trying to heal from, so resist the urge to disregard them and continue.
Attempting to recover solely from narcissistic abuse is one of the riskiest things you can do. In any case, there will be moments when you require a support system. Going through the healing process alone is one of the simplest ways to relapse into the narcissistic abuse cycle. Therefore, you might want to think about mending a relationship with someone who was coerced or blackmailed into the flying monkey position.
Determine who should remain in your life and who should leave
You can decide which flying monkey species to maintain in your life and which ones to let go of once you completely understand the many flying monkey species. It is challenging to accomplish this since the goal of narcissistic abuse is to make you feel powerless to make decisions of this nature on your own.
It is up to you to let go of the limitations your abuser set on you even though you were the victim of violence. Even though it’s not a simple process and you’ll probably require a doctor’s help. The idea that you have the right to govern every area of your life will be ingrained in your unconscious.
Establishing healthy boundaries and maintaining your reality in a journal
Now that you’ve recognized the flying monkeys in your life and determined if it was safe to repair the broken links, it’s time to protect yourself from gaslighting. The ex-flying monkeys you’re trying to reach may occasionally gaslight you without meaning to. It could manifest itself in small or significant ways, such as a test or an effort to conceal their treachery.
Suppose you keep a journal to document your thoughts, feelings, needs, and spoken things. In that case, you are much less likely to fall prey to manipulative techniques like gaslighting that either draw you back in or keep you imprisoned in the narcissistic abuse cycle.
Take away
Flying monkeys are helpful for various strategies and can help the narcissist in your life. It is crucial to comprehend their plan to prevent slipping back into the narcissistic abuse cycle. From the narcissist’s perspective, having followers who blindly obey you is terrific. It calms their erratic emotional whims and quells their irrational desire for dominance.
Before attempting to manage narcissistic abuse, you must educate yourself on all the numerous facets of narcissism. Because nearly every narcissistic behavior pattern can be connected to very complicated dynamics, such as a narcissist’s emotional instability. You may begin by acting out with more narcissistic wrath. One of a select few facets of the narcissistic universe that, if you take the time to grasp them, may reveal a lot about narcissism, in general, is the narcissistic fury.
FAQs
What do flying monkeys mean in narcissism?
Narcissists’ little “henchmen,” also known as “narcissistic flying monkeys,” support their delusional perception of the world and self-centered behavior.
Flying monkeys can make it very difficult to get away from harmful situations. They impede your growth by unnecessarily making you question your vision of reality, giving the healing process the appearance of a hall of mirrors.
Are flying monkeys also narcissists?
Flying monkeys frequently exhibit highly narcissistic behaviors, such as the impulse to dominate and manipulate others and want to be acknowledged.
How do narcissists deal with flying monkeys?
The flying monkeys may initially try to convince you to give the narcissist another chance. They’ll probably recite the same defenses and justifications for their actions that the narcissist gave them. Second, flying monkeys might “help” you. These individuals will pose as your buddies.
What does it mean when someone calls you a flying monkey?
Flying monkeys are a tool for narcissists to further their ends. A narcissist might choose to keep their criticism of you to themselves to maintain their appeal, but they might also surreptitiously tell a few people how awful you are.